Ever hear of The Fellowship Foundation? How about The Order? They have more names, Legion, as they say.

One thing draws them all together: They each spell the Good Lord’s name with dollar signs. And they use the money to gain power. And they use the power to gain money.

That does not follow Christ’s precepts.That follows the precepts of Machiavellin and Rove.

One person suffering from it is a good man running for the U.S. Senate in Nevada, Jack Carter. He is the son of former President Jimmy Carter, himself a good man.

Jack Carter’s opponent is a fellah named Ensign.A bit about him and the vast Right Wing Church of Capital and Power:

Senator Ensign and The Bonds of Fellowship

guest post by myrna the minx

EXCERPT…

Nevada's junior Senator, John Ensign, has a reputation for looking good and ingratiating himself to corporate America, particularly to telecommunications giants like AT&T that help the government spy on American citizens. Nevada bloggers like the Las Vegas Gleaner, the Desert Beacon, and even the usually single-minded Nevada Scandalmonger at Vote Gibbons Out have been diligently documenting Ensign's tendency to choose the interests of corporations over consumers for years. With just about every vote he makes or position he takes, Ensign has proved that he is no friend of the real working men and women of this country. Usually operating under the radar while his more famous and influential conservative colleagues do the work of rolling back support for preventative health care, education, civil rights, and the environment, with the stem cell research debate, Ensign has been pushed into the spotlight. But hey, he likes kittens. Ensign's latest move was to be one of the 37 Senators to vote against HR 810, legislation that would have allowed federal funding for research on stem cell lines derived from embryos that would otherwise be destroyed, and one of the few pieces of legislation in a long time to have strong bi-partisan support. In state known for its strong libertarian streak, Ensign has exhibited no backbone whatsoever. He's made a career out of being a Bush lackey.

Since assuming his seat, Ensign has voted with Bush 96% of the time. He even managed a perfect score in 2004. Was his vote against HR 810 a surprise? Of course not. But any cursory look at Ensign's background brings up some pretty interesting associations with groups front and center in the culture ware between those who think Christian ideology should play a central role in government—groups on the far right like the Promise Keepers, the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council, and the Fellowship.

Ensign's constituents are barely aware of how he votes on the issues—they're either bamboozled by his game show host good looks or deceived by ring general Harry Reid's protective order. But you've never heard of the Fellowship have you? That, my friends, is completely by design. You're probably familiar with the National Prayer breakfast they sponsor once a year and attended by the President and other influential people, but the rest of their operation is a mystery to us lay folks who don't see a place for religion in politics. When its members are asked about the Fellowship, they either deny its existence or decline to answer questions. In 2002, The Los Angeles Times published an article called "Showing Faith in Discretion" by Lisa Getter, that gives us an inside glimpse into this secretive group:

"The Fellowship is a collection of public officials, business leaders and religious ministries that defies easy description. Sometimes known as the prayer group movement, its members espouse a common devotion to the teachings of Jesus and a belief that peace and justice can come about through quiet efforts to change individuals, particularly those in positions of power. Personal outreach is paramount. ….They also share a vow of silence about Fellowship activities."

SNIP…

Clearly we can forget about the separation of church and state here. Although the Fellowship maintains its rule of working in silence is purely a religious insistence on humility, its pretty clear they remain silence to prevent the public from learning about influence they have and how they use it. I was unable to confirm whether this is still the case, but in 2002, who do you think was living in a house owned by the Fellowship on Capital Hill that just happens to be registered as a church? Why, our own Senator Ensign along with fellow soldiers of the culture war Sam Brownback and Tom Coburn (who proposed the death penalty for doctors who performed abortions, which I guess means he also believes in suicide since he has been exposed as a doctor who performed abortions). Reportedly, Tom Delay is another famous member. According to Jeff Sharlet in the January 2006 article for Rolling Stone magazine, Brownback was brought into the Fellowship fold by Frank Carlson, a former Republican senator from Kansas. Sharlet points out that at a 1955 meeting of the Fellowship, Carlson declared the group's mission to be "'Worldwide Spiritual Offensive,' a vision of manly Christianity dedicated to the expansion of American power as a means of spreading the gospel." No church and state conflict there. More on the Fellowship's god peddling from Jeff Sharlet for Rolling Stone:

"They were striving, ultimately, for what Coe calls 'Jesus plus nothing' -- a government led by Christ's will alone. In the future envisioned by Coe, everything -- sex and taxes, war and the price of oil -- will be decided upon not according to democracy or the church or even Scripture. The Bible itself is for the masses; in the Fellowship, Christ reveals a higher set of commands to the anointed few. It's a good old boy's club blessed by God. Brownback even lived with other cell members in a million-dollar, red-brick former convent at 133 C Street that was subsidized and operated by the Fellowship. Monthly rent was $600 per man -- enough of a deal by Hill standards that some said it bordered on an ethical violation, but no charges were ever brought. Brownback and Ensign also lived with Fellowship brother Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma doctor who has advocated the death penalty for abortion providers. The men in Brownback's cell talk about politics, but the senator insists it's not political. 'It's about faith and action,' he says. According to 'Thoughts on a Core Group,' the primary purpose of the cell is to become an 'invisible "believing" group.' Any action the cell takes is an outgrowth of belief, a natural extension of 'agreements reached in faith and in prayer.' Deals emerge not from a smoke-filled room but from a prayer-filled room. 'Typically,' says Brownback, 'one person grows desirous of pursuing an action' -- a piece of legislation, a diplomatic strategy -- 'and the others pull in behind.' In 1999, Brownback worked with Rep. Joe Pitts, a Fellowship brother, to pass the Silk Road Strategy Act, designed to block the growth of Islam in Central Asian nations by bribing them with lucrative trade deals. That same year, he teamed up with two Fellowship associates -- former Sen. Don Nickles and the late Sen. Strom Thurmond -- to demand a criminal investigation of a liberal group called Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Last year, several Fellowship brothers, including Sen. John Ensign, another resident of the C Street house, supported Brownback's broadcast decency bill. And Pitts and Coburn joined Brownback in stumping for the Houses of Worship Act to allow tax-free churches to endorse candidates. The most bluntly theocratic effort, however, is the Constitution Restoration Act, which Brownback co-sponsored with Jim DeMint, another former C Streeter who was then a congressman from South Carolina. If passed, it will strip the Supreme Court of the ability to even hear cases in which citizens protest faith-based abuses of power. Say the mayor of your town decides to declare Jesus lord and fire anyone who refuses to do so; or the principal of your local high school decides to read a fundamentalist prayer over the PA every morning; or the president declares the United States a Christian nation. Under the Constitution Restoration Act, that'll all be just fine."

By Anthony Lappé, Guerrilla News NetworkPosted on June 13, 2003, Printed on October 16, 2006

It sounded like a reality show on the PAX network: Six conservative politicians living in a DC townhouse owned by a fundamentalist Christian organization. What happens when you stop being polite and start finding Jesus?

In April, the AP broke the story that six U.S. congressmen were paying the bargain rate of $600 a month each to live together in a swanky DC townhouse owned by a secretive fundamentalist Christian group known as the Fellowship or the Foundation. Many, understandably, were curious. Who is this organization, and what is its agenda?

The group, the AP reported, is best known for holding the annual National Prayer Breakfast at the White House, which offers scores of national and international heavy hitters the opportunity to praise God in close proximity to the President. In the article, the congressmen boarding at the house denied owing any allegiance to the group, and several professed ignorance of even the most basic facts about the organization. Little else was reported about the group's history, motives or backers.

Gee. How weird is that? People who don’t believe in separation of church and state.

Ask George Washington: That’s un-American.

Ask Ed Meese. He should know.

Jesus Plus Nothing

Originally from Harper's Magazine, March 2003. By Jeffrey Sharlet.

And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. —Matthew 10:36

This is how they pray: a dozen clear-eyed, smooth-skinned “brothers” gathered together in a huddle, arms crossing arms over shoulders like the weave of a cable, leaning in on one another and swaying like the long grass up the hill from the house they share. The house is a handsome, gray, two-story colonial that smells of new carpet and Pine-Sol and aftershave; the men who live there call it Ivanwald. At the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac, quiet but for the buzz of lawn mowers and kids playing foxes-and-hounds in the park across the road, Ivanwald sits as one house among many, clustered together like mushrooms, all devoted, like these men, to the service of Jesus Christ. The men tend every tulip in the cul-de-sac, trim every magnolia, seal every driveway smooth and black as boot leather. And they pray, assembled at the dining table or on their lawn or in the hallway or in the bunk room or on the basketball court, each man's head bowed in humility and swollen with pride (secretly, he thinks) at being counted among such a fine corps for Christ, among men to whom he will open his heart and whom he will remember when he returns to the world not born-again but remade, no longer an individual but part of the Lord's revolution, his will transformed into a weapon for what the young men call “spiritual war.”

SNIP…

Two weeks into my stay, David Coe, Doug's son and the presumptive heir to leadership of the Family, dropped by the house. My brothers and I assembled in the living room, where David had draped his tall frame over a burgundy leather recliner like a frat boy, one leg hanging over a padded arm.

“You guys,” David said, “are here to learn how to rule the world.” He was in his late forties, with dark, gray-flecked hair, an olive complexion, and teeth like a slab of white marble. We sat around him in a rough circle, on couches and chairs, as the afternoon light slanted through the wooden blinds onto walls adorned with foxhunting lithographs and a giant tapestry of the Last Supper. Rafael, a wealthy Ecuadoran who'd been a college soccer star before coming to Ivanwald, had a hard time with English, and he didn't understand what David had said. So he stared, lips parted in puzzlement. David seemed to like that. He stared back, holding Raf's gaze like it was a pretty thing he'd found on the ground. “You have very intense eyes,” David said.

SNIP…

The Family was founded in April 1935 by Abraham Vereide, a Norwegian immigrant who made his living as a traveling preacher. One night, while lying in bed fretting about socialists, Wobblies, and a Swedish Communist who, he was sure, planned to bring Seattle under the control of Moscow, Vereide received a visitation: a voice, and a light in the dark, bright and blinding. The next day he met a friend, a wealthy businessman and former major, and the two men agreed upon a spiritual plan. They enlisted nineteen business executives in a weekly breakfast meeting and together they prayed, convinced that Jesus alone could redeem Seattle and crush the radical unions. They wanted to give Jesus a vessel, and so they asked God to raise up a leader. One of their number, a city councilman named Arthur Langlie, stood and said, “I am ready to let God use me.” Langlie was made first mayor and later governor, backed in both campaigns by money and muscle from his prayer-breakfast friends, whose number had rapidly multiplied.<5> Vereide and his new brothers spread out across the Northwest in chauffeured vehicles (a $20,000 Dusenburg carried brothers on one mission, he boasted). “Men,” wrote Vereide, “thus quickened.” Prayer breakfast groups were formed in dozens of cities, from San Francisco to Philadelphia. There were already enough men ministering to the down-and-out, Vereide had decided; his mission field would be men with the means to seize the world for God. Vereide called his potential flock of the rich and powerful, those in need only of the “real” Jesus, the “up-and-out.”

Vereide arrived in Washington, D.C., on September 6, 1941, as the guest of a man referred to only as “Colonel Brindley.” “Here I am finally,” he wrote to his wife, Mattie, who remained in Seattle. “In a day or two—many will know that I am in town and by God's grace it will hum.” Within weeks he had held his first D.C. prayer meeting, attended by more than a hundred congressmen. By 1943, now living in a suite at Colonel Brindley's University Club, Vereide was an insider. “My what a full and busy day!” he wrote to Mattie on January 22.

The Vice President brought me to the Capitol and counseled with me regarding the programs and plans, and then introduced me to Senator Brewster, who in turn to Senator Burton—then planned further the program and enlisted their cooperation. Then to the Supreme Court for visits with some of them . . . then back to the Senate, House. . . . The hand of the Lord is upon me. He is leading.

By the end of the war, nearly a third of U.S. senators attended one of his weekly prayer meetings.

Here's the ironic part. Shouldn't American leaders be aware that the NAZIs were evil?

Author interview excerpt...

GNN: In that vein, reading your article I got the impression they are praising guys like Adolph Hitler and Ghengis Khan -- a lot. Is that a fair assessment of your intention?

SHARLET: In fact, Harpers made me cut back on that stuff. 'We know it's true, but this is already so much to absorb.' That's why I included that line at the end of the story. The leader of the group is having dinner with the younger members of that group and is talking about the bond, the covenant. And he says, "Can anyone think of someone who had a covenant?" And the answer, of course, and everyone knows it, is "Hitler."

Wish this were simpler to detail. The story of how these phonies hijacked Jesus for the sake of capitalism is important, not just for the record, but for tomorrow – from Jack Carter in Nevada to all those troops hoping to come home from Iraq and to the frightened people around the world. The Truth shall set us free.

A few important things to know about the assassination of President Kennedy

President John F. Kennedy was proud to be a Liberal Democrat who worked every day he was in office to keep the peace and to make life better for all Americans. As President, Kennedy worked to make ours a stronger nation and this a better world.

Many in the country opposed him for his Liberal perspective on civil rights. Kennedy ordered the integration of more than college campuses, he ordered the FBI and Secret Service to hire African American agents.

Others opposed his Liberal policies towards other nations and regions. Kennedy favored economic development of the Third World, rather than the past approach of siding with a particular nation's strongman or oligarch to more economically steal the natural resources. In Africa, his policies were to help people learn to feed themselves, read to their kids, and take care of the sick and elderly. That policy, Kennedy believed, would make the United States longer and better allies. Most, if not all, of his successors returned to the traditional policy of stealing all that a nation had to offer.

JFK also made enemies with the most frightening elements of the psychology that is the United States. The monied elite that owns the contracts and politicians that put the pork on the table for their sponsors are no strangers to violence. They make their biggest money off of the most horrible thing there is.

The War Party presented Kennedy with Operation NORTHWOODS, a plan that suggested the US Government kill Americans and make it look like Cuba did it as a pretext for war with Cuba and the Soviet Union. Kennedy said, "No." And he fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who submitted it.

Then came November 22, 1963 and Dallas.

After President Kennedy was dead, the War Party made out like Lee Harvey Oswald did it. And the FBI, CIA and Warren Commission (as revealed through Dulles' "Mighty Wurlitzer") left a trail of "fixed" evidence to make it out Oswald was working for Cuba and its master, the Soviet Union.

Thanks for stopping in to check out this journal. I'd also like to thank DU for making it possible.

The reason it's here is to get people aware of what the Bush Transnational Criminal Enterprise does to destroy the United States of America; how they loot the nation's Treasury; impoverish We the People; cover our planet with war; work to enslave our children; and kill those who oppose them. My journal also is here to try and help prevent the world these pirates, slavemasters and warmongers work night and day to create.

Please feel free to spread the information, opinions, ideas and links. Please let me know if I've made a mistake or if you disagree with me.

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